Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Perils of Reporting Sexual Harassment

Abstract

It has been almost ten years since I reported my colleague Alan White, a tenured professor in the finance department at Miami University's School of Business, for sexual harassment. In retrospect, I realize that reporting the harassment to my employer was not the wisest course of action. I "won" my case, but in the long run, it was I who was the loser. The time, energy, and money that I spent in negotiating the pathways of the university's labyrinthine procedure, as well as the retaliation that ultimately drove me to leave my job, made my victory a hollow one, indeed.

Judicial opinions on sexual harassment portray reporting as the only reasonable course of action for the woman who finds herself the target of sexual harassment in the workplace. The hazards of reporting rarely are discussed, because the law assumes that employers are objective, nondiscriminating entities that do not tolerate harassment in the workplace and that employers' and victims' interests coincide. Nothing is further from the truth.

Reporting does not solve the harassment problem within an organization, because reporting is a solution to an individual problem. Harassment is not an individual problem; it is an organizational problem. While harassment may occur in any workplace, its occurrence is not, as the courts assume, a merely random, unpredictable event. Harassment is far more likely to occur in male-dominated workplaces in which women are perceived as interlopers onto male work turf and in workplaces in which harassing workplace conduct is tolerated or condoned. It is in precisely these workplaces where reporting harassment is the riskiest for the woman involved.

Keywords: sexual harassment, colleges and university procedures, narrative